FCC Head Ajit Pai: Killing Net Neutrality Will Set the Internet Free
Ultimately the problems we have with "net neutrality" are just another symptom of the cronyism and regulatory capture in the broadband market. In a free market, you'd be stupid to arbitrarily limit traffic, because people will leave for a competitor that doesn't.
Twenty years ago, we didn't have this problem.
Competition existed because both providers and consumers were operating using regular off the shelf equipment, using regular connectivity products anyone could buy at market based prices (modems, phone lines, etc). You might have had 50 or more options that could provide comparable service, and it would be commercial suicide to purposely limit your service.
Now, you probably have 2 options, your phone company and your cable company. 2 competitors is not a viable market, it's a duoploy and hardly better than a monopoly.
If the FCC wants to set the internet free, they should work towards reducing the difficulty of entering the market, not by writing a bunch of feel good but unenforceable guidelines about sharing your cookies with your friends.
But they don't, because the head of the FCC is a Verizon lawyer.
yup...don't regulate it. Any time the government want's to help you it never works out the way you want it to.
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Asking the wolves to help guard the hen house from the foxes doesn't work. Never has. Usually it ends up with foxes AND wolves eating the chickens.
And so it is with this legislation.
this legislation?
you mean Obama's regulations or Trump's that repeals it?
Somebody finally said it. mises.org/wire has discussed this many times over. Glad somebody brought this up on steemit.
Check https://maidsafe.net/ which is a project older than Bitcoin itself that's made to build the new internet.
ARPANET >> Internet >> MaidSafe
You make a lot of good and important points. I don't fully agree with your post.
Phone companies rely on infrastructure built by the government. If we had government internet infrastructure and then used store-bought equipment to access it, as we used to with dial-up, then we'd be back where we were.
I do not see how the government can reduce barriers to entry sufficiently to enable new firms to enter and compete unless it provides the infrastructure and rents it out competitively.
Once that has been done, then consumers would have a real set choices, and abusive firms would simply be abandoned. Until it is done, or until technology goes completely wireless, there will be monopolistic characteristics that enable abuse (and result in demands for government prevention of that abuse).